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Monday, 29 September 2014

HOMES DESTROYED FOR KING’S VANITY

Homes have been demolished against residents’ wishes to
make way for another of King Mswati III’s ‘vanity projects’.

The King wants to build a Royal Science and Innovation Park/ Biotechnology
Park at Nokwane.

Residents of ten homesteads tried to get a court order to
stop their homes being demolished but were told
by the Attorney-General the courts were powerless and only the King himself
could stop the destruction.

King Mswati rules Swaziland as sub-Saharan Africa’s last
absolute monarch.

The homesteads, which were mostly stick-and-mud houses,
were bulldozed on Thursday (25 September 2014). Local media reported that
residents were traumatised when about 20 armed police officers forced them out and
at least three residents needed hospital treatment. Some people had lived at Nokwane for
at least 20 years, the Swazi Observer newspaper reported.

The newspaper
reported, ‘The [police] officers, who were armed with pistols, rifles and batons
moved from one homestead to another as the sheriff informed the residents of
the demolitions which were to be effected in a matter of time.’

The clearance was to make way for the building of a Royal
Science and Innovation Park/ Biotechnology Park. When the project was first
announced in 2010 it was criticised
by observers as another ‘vanity project’ for the King. It runs alongside the Sikhuphe
International Airport (now renamed King Mswati III Airport) which was
officially opened in March 2014 after costing at
least E3 billion (US$300 million) to build. No commercial airlines have used the airport, but
Swaziland Airlink, a company controlled by the Swazi Government, has been
forced to abandon using Matsapha Airport and will move to Sikhuphe in October
2014.

In 2010,
Moses Zungu, the Project Manager for the Royal Science and Innovation Park/
Biotechnology Park, said the first phase of the project, which would involve
basic infrastructure such as roads, drainage, landscaping and other works,
would cost E850 million (US$85 million). He said the first phase would start in
April 2011 – more than three years ago.

No needs analysis for the development has been published, but Zungu said
in 2010 the science park was the initiative of the King.

In July 2011 it was revealed that the Swazi Government had taken out a
US$20 million loan to part-finance the science park. The loan, in the form of a
line of credit, was from the Export-Import
Bank of India.

More than seven in ten of King Mswati’s 1.3 million subjects live in
abject poverty with incomes of less than US$2 per day. The kingdom has the
highest rate of HIV infection in the world and earlier this year the Swazi Minister
of Health Sibongile Ndlela-Simelane said there was not enough money
to pay for drugs to prevent the death of children from diarrhoea in the kingdom.